A Mob Life, on the Margins and Out of Favor

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

January 24, 2014

You think you’ve got problems?

Put yourself in Vincent Asaro’s shoes.

He’s never been one of the bosses’ favorites in his decades of service in the Bonanno crime family, according to federal prosecutors, and has slid up and down the family’s hierarchy. He once pushed for his son to become a captain in the family, and for what? Now his son barely talks to him.

He once put out a contract on a cousin because he suspected that he had become an informer, court records show. Even that didn’t work out (the contract was never carried out).

Now Mr. Asaro, 78, is in a federal jail, being held after his arrest on Thursday for a slate of charges that includes the legendary $6 million Lufthansa heist in 1978, a case so cold that it had been marked closed in 1989.

In the operatically messy history of the five organized crime families, other mob figures have been more coldblooded or colorful — Mr. Asaro does not even have a nickname, unlike two of his co-defendants, known as Tommy D and Bazoo.

But there may not be one under greater strain right now than Mr. Asaro, who seems even better suited for a therapist’s couch than Tony Soprano.

Start with his relationship with his son, Jerome Asaro, who was charged in the indictment with participating with his father in various crimes: arson, an attempted robbery of an armored car, a $1.25 million FedEx robbery and conspiracy to cover up a murder.

Not exactly the usual father-son bonding exercises. Indeed, Mr. Asaro, in recordings made by federal agents, complained about his son’s greed.

“Jerry’s for Jerry,” the father said. “I lost my son when I made him skipper.”

Then there were the anger issues. After confronting a handful of young men who had thrown a bottle toward a social club in Ozone Park, Queens, that Mr. Asaro and his friends frequented, Mr. Asaro took off his glasses, ripped off his shirt and challenged them to a fight.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The young men responded that they would not fight an old man, according to a legal filing that recounts the episode.

In August 2012, he told a friend how, in the span of a few weeks, he had hit one man in the head with a bottle, punched another man in the face at the Belmont racetrack and kicked a third man.

“I punched a guy in the face,” Mr. Asaro said of the incident at Belmont.

“Yeah, it’s a whole big thing,” he added. “Nothing happened.”

In decades of service to the Bonanno crime family, Vincent Asaro was never one of the bosses' favorites. He doesn't even have a nickname.

Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters

At a meeting over how to best collect a debt, Mr. Asaro gave a quick order: “Stab him today.”

When a younger mobster asked him, “When?” Mr. Asaro responded, “Today, today,” later expressing frustration that it was taking so long.

Mr. Asaro was demoted after his superiors concluded he was a habitual gambler who was “robbing” his subordinates — taking more than his share of the loot, according to a legal filing.

Yet Mr. Asaro complained in a recording about having money troubles.

“I blew it, gambling,” he told a fellow mobster about the profits from a recent payoff. “What are you making a face? Why, who are you, you better than me?”

Despite his troubles, Mr. Asaro’s long familial history with the mob — his father and uncle were “made” members of the Bonanno family — taught him how to be a survivor.

He lived through mob wars and mob defections, staying out of prison for more time than he was in it. He gained a reputation among prosecutors for being unusually sly or lucky, or both, and managing, from the storefront of his fence business in Ozone Park, to remain safely on the periphery of major investigations.

Gerald McMahon, Mr. Asaro’s lawyer, said that accused mobsters often fell into two categories: the flashy guys, like John Gotti, and people like Vincent Gigante, the boss of the Genovese family, “who didn’t ever want to be photographed.”

“Mr. Asaro falls into the category of not wanting to be in the limelight,” Mr. McMahon continued, “and that’s how you get to be 78, still out on the street and still alive.”

While he has been arrested some 21 times since 1957, on charges including bank robbery and assault, prosecutors noted in a filing on Thursday that “many of the charges for which he was arrested in these cases were later dismissed.”

Now he finds himself charged with one of the biggest cases of all. His lawyer said Mr. Asaro, who has pleaded not guilty, intends to prevail at trial.

He most likely had an idea that federal agents were onto him in June when they began digging at the home of a late associate’s daughter. The associate, James Burke, known as Jimmy the Gent, was long believed to be the mastermind of the Lufthansa heist. At Mr. Burke’s daughter’s home, near Liberty Avenue in South Ozone Park, authorities found the remains of a man who investigators believe was murdered by Mr. Asaro and Mr. Burke in 1969.

Another mobster, who is believed to have buried the body, wore a recording device for the government and met with Mr. Asaro when the dig had begun and hinted to him that the federal agents were at the site.